»Expect the unexpected« – thus was the headline to a review of Oneohtrix Point Never. It’s meant to sound like a paradox, but it’s something you can easily deliver as an audience. Whether this does justice to Daniel Lopatin’s music is questionable nonetheless. After all, with his tenth album, you can expect certain things from this consistently quirky musician. And »Again« does not disappoint. Beginning with dissonant avant-garde string sounds, he abruptly changes the pitch on the title track that follows, as he has often done in the past, to a childlike computer voice, around which similarly childlike digital melodies swirl, or rather glide with glissandi. Then the whole piece reverses its character, rising to electronic humming pathos, until this too evaporates and the strings from the first track seem to return, now in dialogue with alienated vocal fragments. The album often oscillates between playful abstraction and half-concrete song movements, between dense power and wafer-thin chirps. Which, in its juggling with unstable structures, is something very typical of Lopatin. Yet, generally speaking, artists also want to be recognised. And this »real« Oneohtrix Point Never really gets down to business with concentrated distraction, doling out his oddities so skilfully that they come across as compelling. More of the same, please!
Squid
Cowards
Warp